NEW MEXICO / SOUTHWEST — Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby - Craig Varjabedian

Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby handsomely reproduces [Varjabedian's] black and white photographs that portray the parched New Mexican soil under tumultuous skies that spoke to and so captured Georgia O'Keeffe's creative imagination. 

— Journal of the Print World

The remarkable photographs by Craig Varjabedian are not only beautiful, but also extremely valuable documents of architecture, culture and lifestyle. From intimate portraits to expansive landscapes, Varjabedian's images, made primarily in black and white, celebrate the drama ad potency inherent in each subject's relationship to the photographer.

— Beaumont Newhall, preeminent 20th-century photographic historian and author of History of Photography: 1939 to the Present

Ghost Ranch is perhaps best known as the longtime home of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who captured some of the its most stunning scenery in her paintings. For more than twenty years, award-winning, fine art photographer Craig Varjabedian has explored and captured the red cliffs and sweeping plains of this fabled 21,000-acre area in northern New Mexico. In Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby, he shares over 90 new duotone photographs capturing its evanescent light.

These images reach beyond familiar ideas associated with the Ranch — such as its renown as a site of personal renewal and transformation — into Varjabedian's singular vision of his subject and its ties to ideas of identity, place, and perception.

The name of photographic treasure comes from one of O’Keeffe’s famous paintings, From the Faraway, Nearby. In O’Keeffe wrote in 1976 that the Far Away was “a beautiful, untouched lonely-feeling place.”

Elaborating on his choice of book titles, Varjabedian said: "What she found in the West, and at Ghost Ranch, was a place where the open possibility of the landscape became one with what she felt inside herself, where depth and focus at once conflated the spatial orientation of the objects she painted, and pulled her nearer to her creative source.”

To further illuminate the experience of Ghost Ranch, Varjabedian gathered an "appreciation" of Ghost Ranch, written by Georgia O'Keeffe, and essays written to accompany his photographs. These include an evocative introduction by photographer Jay Packer, an essay by writer Marin Sardy examining the place's natural features and social history, and topical essays by theological studies professor Belden C. Lane, arts writer Douglas A. Fairfield, and former Ghost Ranch executive director Rob Craig. Also included are forewords by Cathy L. Wright, director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, and Debra Hepler, executive director of Ghost Ranch. (See About the Author below)

The Back Story

While walking home on a snowy Michigan day in 1970 after taking pictures for his high school newspaper, fourteen-year-old Craig Varjabedian passed by an art gallery. Inside he saw a man with a thick white beard hanging pictures on the wall of a gallery. The teenager was awestruck by images of sky and stone, mountains and rivers, trees and thunderclouds. Seeing the young onlooker, the old man invited him in. Soon they were talking about cameras and photography.

The white-haired man was Ansel Adams; and this chance meeting sealed Varjabedian’s future.

After studying art and photography at the University of Michigan and Rochester Institute of Technology, Varjabedian went to New Mexico to finish his thesis. There, a friend took him to see Ghost Ranch, an inspirational mecca for artists, poets, painters, and photographers, including Ansel Adams, who was a frequent visitor, and Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted there for more than fifty years.

“It is an almost mythic land located in northern New Mexico, and when I first saw it over twenty years ago, it took my breath away,” says Varjabedian, who has been photographing the majestic landscape ever since. “I remember driving up the road and cresting the top of a hill where the whole Ghost Ranch valley opens up and felt like I had come home. Since that time, it has been a quest to make images that were consonant with the feelings the place evoked in me.”

I know exactly how he feels! I had the good fortune to be introduced to the mesmerizing beauty of northern New Mexico as a child, and if I don't get to visit several times a year to soak in its gentle grandeur and recharge my soul, well, let's just say I get a bit cranky. And, because Georgia O'Keeffe lived in and began to develop her unique style near my hometown in the Texas Panhandle, I was introduced to her work through the local museum at a young age.

Growing up in that ocean of land and sky, O'Keeffe's art was not abstract to me in any way - she was just trying to get people to see the beauty - often small, simple and taken for granted - that surrounds us daily. 

Ghost Ranch is located 14 miles north of the village of Abiquiu, which is about 50 miles northwest of Santa Fe. The vast landscape is absolutely stunning at any time of day, in any season. And that is why I am so proud to offer Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby in my shop! Craig Varjabedian's rich, engrossing black-and-white photographs help you do what Georgia O'Keeffe wanted people to do - see, really see...

Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

— Georgia O'Keeffe

So, take the time to slow down, breath deeply and see, really see the beauty of Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby.

And if you want to savor some Georgia O'Keeffe at the same time, then you will want the must-have and newly published Georgia O'Keeffe Words l Works, Volume 1, that is in our Art & Photography Collection.

Want to get up close and personal, then also check out Day Hikes in the Santa Fe Area in our Places Collection. 

Awards

2010 winner of prestigious Wrangler Award for Outstanding Photography Book from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

BOOK DESCRIPTION

• Condition: New in New dust jacket. Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition - Published June 16, 2009
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• ISBN-13: 978-0826336217
• Pages: 144
• Rating:★★★★ (See FAQs)

• About the Author

• Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images die with an authenticity that reveals the inseparable ties between identity, place and act of perceiving.
• For Varjabedian, the art of photography is a receptive process driven by the openness to the revelation each subject offers, rather than the desire to manipulate form or catalog detail. He achieves this intensely personal vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the ineffable sprit of a moment come together in exceptional and often startling ways. 
• "The remarkable photographs by Craig Varjabedian are not only beautiful, but also extremely valuable documents of architecture, culture and lifestyle. From intimate portraits to expansive landscapes, Varjabedian's images, made primarily in black and white, celebrate the drama ad potency inherent in each subject's relationship to the photographer, said Beaumont Newhall, preeminent 20th-century photographic historian and author of History of Photography: 1939 to the Present.
• "The one thing that never changes is that moment of recognition when I feel the play of light, shadow, and texture resolve itself into something amazing," Vajabedian explains. Through this process, he offers viewers a new way of seeing — one that transcends mundane perception and expands our awareness of the potential of every moment. 
• In 1991, he co-produced an Emmy Award-winning film about his work entitled En Divina Luz: The Penitente Morados of New Mexico. Photographs from this book were published in a book by the same name, with an essay by Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Michael Wallis. Other books by Craig Varjabedian include Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait.